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Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Announcing Google App Engine for Business

We launched Google App Engine two years ago to enable application developers to rapidly build and scale their apps on Google’s infrastructure, without having to worry about maintaining their own servers. Today, we’re excited to bring this platform to IT departments, with the announcement of Google App Engine for Business. Google App Engine for Business lets organizations build and maintain their applications on the same scalable architecture that powers Google applications, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise.

Google App Engine for Business introduces a number of new features that our enterprise customers have been asking for, including:

Centralized administration: A new, company-focused administration console lets you manage all the applications in your domain.

Reliability and support: 99.9% uptime service level agreement, with premium developer support available.

Secure by default: Only users from your Google Apps domain can access applications and your security policies are enforced on every app.

Pricing that makes sense: Each application costs just $8 per user, per month up to a maximum of $1000 a month. Pay only for what you use.

With these new features, we’re making it easier for businesses to take advantage of the core benefits of Google App Engine: easy development using languages you already know (Java and Python); simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability, automatically getting the capacity you need when you need it.

Google App Engine for Business is currently in preview, opened to a limited number of enterprises. Learn more about how you can participate, and check our roadmap to follow features as they become available.

KCWilson - by my reading it's people accessing apps deployed on appengine. The expectation is these will be users on your intranet. For public apps - websites etc. - there'll be a different billing model which I imagine will be the same as the current AppEngine system, but pricier.

Looks very interesting but are you guys going to sort out the full text search story at least for this "for business" version? That is the biggest show stopper for me and my company right now and I do not think we are the only ones struggling with this.

AdSense - which is responsible for more than 90% of Google's revenue - does not even have a phone number! Nor an email address (it auto-rejects you to go to the forums)! And the forums aren't even monitored by a Google employee!

The Nexus One was released without ANY support whatsoever!

I don't think the old Goog has enough experience with support, or respect for it - especially enterprise class support - to take this to serious heights.

Only time will tell. But after trying for seven months to solve a simple AdSense problem that would have taken 2 mins over the phone - I certainly won't be the first guinea pig.

+1 on Manjoor's comment. These two constraints are my biggest source of headaches with GAE. The 30 second limit, coupled with the horrible performance of JDO, forced me to rewrite a good chunk of my app using the native API. The lack of SQL forced me to sync to an external MySQL database for reporting capabilities. Not having to do both would have cut at least 20% of the sum development time.